RiptoR says:

Damn, I know I should have picked up Oblivion this weekend when I was at the store. Gold bundle (game + the 2 expansions) for 20euro is a steal, and I forgot to take it with me :(

June 3rd, 2008 at 8:20 am

Meat Circus says:

Whereas STALKER, on the other hand… STALKER is love.

Though I think it should be forbidden from being granted Open World status due to its cacky loading zone transitions.

June 3rd, 2008 at 8:29 am

Jochen Scheisse says:

Morrowind was just gigantic. I really, REALLY wanted to love it, but it constantly pissed me off by clipping through the dungeon walls all the time, which often trapped my characters by blocking the dungeon exit.

I enjoyed exploring in Gothic 1&2. Also, there already is that tourism game you write about. It’s called Noctis, and it’s freeware. But I have to admit, I have never been ready to invest the time necessary to understand the controls of that game.

June 3rd, 2008 at 8:33 am

hoohoo says:

i cant stand oblivion without at least 50 mods to make it bearable. i get more exploration fun browsing for mods than in vanilla oblivion. i hope for the next one bethesda actually takes the time thats needed to flesh out the world that extra bit. i wish todd howard had the balls to say on the day the game goes gold, sorry guys i was only kidding, work on this for another year.

June 3rd, 2008 at 8:42 am

Mike says:

I loved Oblivion, and I still do. I’ve never got more than halfway through the main quest, because I keep getting distracted and giving myself new goals. The comparison with GTA’s world is spot on. You feel like a different person in Oblivion. There’s an impetus to explore, because it feels like you’re going to miss out unless you start working now. GTA is far sleepier.
I don’t know whether I’d want to see more, or mandatory, exploration. In fact, mandatory exploration often tends to suck. But I think worlds should be more genuinely liveable, as they are in Oblivion. I’m going to replay it once my new PC comes in.

June 3rd, 2008 at 8:45 am

Turin Turambar says:

I am not so sure that Stalker would be better as “Oblivion with guns”. Seems like an attractive idea, but usually shooters needs a bit of structure.

June 3rd, 2008 at 8:52 am

tom says:

Ah, jim is making me feel guilty with this one…
Anyways, I’m required to mention SOTC (i know its not pc), here. It was a careful study of the margins between exploration for its own sake and the enforced ‘mission points’ approach. Tbh I still love exploring in WoW, there are often little areas that ive flown over but never reached that deliberately tease the player to go break in. Im sure stalker would have grabbed me more if my gfx card hadnt made it look like a progamers polyquake. As for eve, I really wanted to find that sense of exploration and wonder, but when the 0 zones dont really look any different from the 1 zones i was a little disappointed. I mean, as already indicated with GTA, too much realism is a bad thing, gimmie floating coral planetoids worlds or molten liquid asteroids.

June 3rd, 2008 at 9:07 am

BrokenSymmetry says:

In Guild Wars I clear a zone completely of all enemies, and then wander around the zone for half an hour, with the HUD completely turned of, just to look at the beautiful environments and architecture. Beautiful, beautiful game.

June 3rd, 2008 at 9:19 am

Lh'owon says:

Jim, excellent – you captured my feelings perfectly there. It’s why I wrote in another thread regarding the next Elder Scrolls game:

I’m not really a big fan of the lore, or the setting, or even the presentation at times, and Bethesda made quite a few serious errors with Oblivion, but I can’t shake the feeling there’s a faint template of my Perfect Game in the series.

It’s the feeling which Tom talks about that made me say that, the “incredible feeling of freedom” that is, at first, more emotion than experience. It’s delight at simply being in the world which to me is an example of transcendent gaming.

June 3rd, 2008 at 9:24 am

ExitJudas says:

You must be an old Table top RPG person. I share your sentiments. Being an old school role playing geek, I really started to play computer games, because I couldn’t play table top role playing all the time. People need to get together, and the DM needs time to prepare, etc. etc.
But the incredible lust for exploration in games, imo comes from roleplaying experiences, simply because a persons brain and language is so much better at creating an open ended experience than a computer game is. As somebody mentioned above: why explore in a game, there is usually nothing there. Well in table top there usually IS something there, and thats the whole difference. Which is why I’m trying to restart an Ars Magica Saga with my old mates, 15 years after i stopped playing rpgs. I am still waiting for the day where someone creates a computer fantasy world with dynamically generated content a la spore.

June 3rd, 2008 at 9:33 am

Frans Coehoorn says:

Yeah Oblivion is nice, but what about Daggerfall? Now THAT was HUGE (although every town was random generated, but hey, it felt like one gargantuan living world!).

While we’re at it: why isn’t there a new Thief with one huge town (or more) to explore? I want a new Thief!

June 3rd, 2008 at 9:35 am

trioptimum says:

Exploration is a strong motivator in games for me, and I often find myself rushing ahead of the story to new locations where the game allows it, rather than pacing the exploration as I probably should. I loved Oblivion, despite its flaws, because the world was just so damned beautiful.

Would anyone pay for a game that was created in the name of aimless wandering tourism?

Absolutely, if it was immersive enough, and especially if the location wasn’t fictional. When someone makes a game that lets you climb in the Himalayas or drive the whole length of an immaculately modelled California Highway 1 I’ll be interested — I’ll likely never be able to do these things in real life so they’re as escapist as the weirdest fantasy worlds and more engaging. Though whether these would count as games at all, or merely some sort of virtual tourism, I’m not sure. But sightseeing in a virtual simulation of the real world is already a selling point for MS Flight Simulator and its ilk. The potential of game technologies today to enable people to travel the world vicariously is incredible, and largely untapped.

Whether such a product would be commercially viable is a different matter.

June 3rd, 2008 at 10:00 am

Dug Briderider says:

I am still exploring Oblivion (on 360 the PC couldn’t cope) I would have liked a little more reward for general rambling.

This debate reminds me of the grandaddy explore-um-up Toe Jam & Earl, where you leveled up according to how much of the map you uncovered, where every inventory item was a mystery untill you used it, and where the best health potion was a fudge sundae.

June 3rd, 2008 at 10:15 am

essell says:

“I wonder what the minimum threshold of activity, the minimum amount of danger and challenge a virtual landscape has to offer to be considered a game?”

I think the more important and relevent question is when people are going to get over the misconception that what we know as “games” (i.e. interactive electronic things) actually need to be games at all.

Viva la Spore, etc.

June 3rd, 2008 at 10:22 am

Tunips says:

Good lord. Somebody else has heard of Outcast.

The experience of going through that first daoka was very much like Oblivion’s sewer pipe – I was immediately hit with the vast beauty of the world. The most remarkable feat of that game was that its big world didn’t ever get dull, or feel either empty or too full. It was a world worth saving. The only game I can think of approaching that ideal is Beyond Good and Evil (so happy!).

It’s a real shame that it complains bitterly about working properly on any modern hardware.

June 3rd, 2008 at 10:27 am

Bursar says:

Midwinter!!

That small mention has given me a hankering to play it again. Does anyone know if it’s abandoware now, or if anyone’s updated it?

June 3rd, 2008 at 10:43 am

Nimic says:

I know this is more of an Oblivion article, but it started off with Age of Conan, so that’s what I’ll comment on.

For me, part of the attraction to AoC is that it really feels like a genuine world. I very much liked exploring in WoW too, but there’s something about those cartoony graphics that makes it a little less immersing.

June 3rd, 2008 at 10:47 am

nakke says:

I loved Oblivion. Sure, I didn’t really play Morrowind (or any of the earlier TES games), so I don’t know what I’m missing, but I loved just wandering around in Oblivion and doing some random quests if I happened to want to “do” something.

Actually, I’ve thought about beginning to play it again recently, with all the new mods and stuff that’s out now. Seems like many of the game’s shortcomings have been fixed in a plethora of mods.

June 3rd, 2008 at 10:50 am

Swan. says:

Massive open worlds scare me.
I feel like i HAVE to to EVERYTHING.

Even in Bioshock, i couldn’t move on until i’d hacked every stall-thingy, searched every box, looked in every room.

Although, in Hellgate London i explored almost every nook and cranny of every level…

Fallout 3 and Far Cry 2 better be good enough for me to do that.

June 3rd, 2008 at 10:55 am

Kareem says:

Someone really needs to write an Oblivion backlash rebuke in the same vein as Kieron’s Bioshock post-mortem. Because Oblivion is, to a greater extent than Bioshock, one of those great games that it quickly became trendy to hate on and garnered its own weird backlash.

June 3rd, 2008 at 11:00 am

Malagate says:

I must confess, I too adore the exploration aspect of videogames, albeit my favourite game for exploration was not initially on PC.

Soul Reaver, I have never enjoyed exploration in a game as much as I have in this one. It’s the combination of how well realised the different areas are, the platforming aspect of getting there (i.e. jump, climb, glide rather than just walk up this hill and around a wood), the fact that many areas are not even necessary to the story but just add a bit of extra background and that those areas contain secrets/powerups that are not necessary to completing the game. By comparison I found Oblivion to be quite lacking, whilst Oblivion is certainly the larger world everywhere felt very similar, from the enemies to the lego dungeons to the leveled equipment. There was the rare gem of a special cave with a unique feature, but these were few and far between the multiudes of goblin mine/cave A-AB.
It was also very frustrating that I’d have to pretty much walk/ride through every area, at best jumping over or up an obstacle or swim through a watery passage. It’d frustrate because there’d be a steep slope or slightly too tall rocks that would be between me and my destination, forcing me to search around for a walkable route rather than just scramble over the rock. Why is there no way to climb? To crawl through small spaces? To vault fences? To slide down a rope? The more options to explore places with, the better.
I would absolutely adore Oblivion if it had a Rope Bow ala Dark Messiah, exploring by firing ropes into wooden beams and swinging along them is pure bliss. In Dark Messiah I took it to the extent that I climbed all the way up a cliff to explore a small wooden cabin hanging over the abyss, there was nothing in there naturally but I was happy just to reach it! It’s this kind of unusual or difficult exploration that really makes my day, exploring in Oblivion felt more like inevitability where you could easily find all places just by walking close to them.

June 3rd, 2008 at 11:04 am

Meat Circus says:

I’m glad to see Oblivion getting the thorough hating it roundly deserves in these comments.

It seems that even the normally reasonable denizens of RPS-land weren’t entirely immune from the debilitating delusion that Oblivion wasn’t a broken, festering turd which swept through the games journo hive mind.

Fortunately, we readers seemed to be mostly immune to the disease.

“10/10!!!” screams Eurogamer.

“Fuck right off”, mutter I, sadly.

June 3rd, 2008 at 11:13 am

Janto says:

In many ways, I’d consider Thief to be a game for explorers. The dodgy, inaccurate maps meant you had to use your head a bit more to figure out where you were and where you should go next – I know I’ve gotten completely lost in several levels on the first play, and the reward of a wee bit extra gold was a solid enough incentive. To be honest, that was the huge failing of the City hub – it was so small and there were so few routes that travelling through it quickly became a repetitive chore, and because the guards knew your face, ‘exploring’ some of the tempting upper balconies could result in a sudden alarm and panicked flight.

I think it’s a balance between consequence and curiosity. Being a virtual ghost isn’t the most appealing thing in the world, a game that focuses on exploring should also deal with how exploring affects the world around the explorer – I’ve heard the first colonists to America carried English earthworms in their bilges that rapidly colonised the east coast and changed the environment – and how the world challenges the explorer. If everything’s easy, then nothing’s worth very much.

And that leads to curiosity. It looks like that’s a place I could get to if I just bounced off that rock… wonder if there’s anything up there? I think curiosity is best helped through motivators that aren’t compulsory, hard to achieve but have a strong, tangible reward associated with them. And, you know, good art design.

June 3rd, 2008 at 11:19 am

fluffy bunny says:

I completely adored Oblivion when it was released, but I never completed it. In the period that followed, I became more and more aware of the flaws the game had – somehow, I forgot the good stuff and remembered the weaknesses.

I went back to it a year later, after upgrading my hardware. I really just wanted to check it, to see how it would run, but ended up completing it (as well as playing though Knights of the Nine and Shivering Isles). In other words, despite all the flaws which I remembered so well, I fell in love with the game all over again.

Every time I hear someone from the anti-Bethesda-brigade complaining about how reviewers didn’t mention the flaws in their reviews and only “noticed” them later on (in previews of FO3, for instance), I remember this.

June 3rd, 2008 at 11:28 am

Meat Circus says:

It’s not spite. It’s kneejerk accurateness.

The hate stems mainly from the fact that a (perhaps well-meaning) coterie of journalists tried to elevate a mediocre lowest common denominator CRPG into a 10/10 brilliancefest, when we’d expect them to be honest and tell us it was nothing of the sort.

It’s perhaps unfortunate that it is games journos, rather than the developers, who are mainly responsible for the hate, since I’m sure they’d still have still sold squillions even if the journo groupthink had been prepared to come clean about the game’s mediocrity.

Mind you, since Halo 3, it’s become clear that Eurogamer, at least, will give 10/10 to any old middling prolefeed shite, so I shouldn’t be too surprised.

June 3rd, 2008 at 11:38 am

grumpy says:

Huh, I didn’t really care for Oblivion. Yes, it was pretty, but just like Morrowind, they forgot to put the game in. Nice graphics and a huge world filled with cookie-cutter quests, cookie-cutter NPC’s, cookie-cutter dungeons and… Well, you get the idea.

This has nothing to do with “recent games”, but yes, I expect that everything is there for a reason. Even if that reason is simply to provide atmosphere, I expect that the world designers have *thought* about it when they designed it. I’d say that it’s fundamental to game design, even.

I guess I just expect more than a big world and open-ended gameplay from a game. I get those things all the time in the real world, *for free*.
With a game, I expect everything to fit together, to offer me an experience.

As for the much vaunted “exploration”, I prefer to explore when there is something for me to explore. Oblivion was a huge randomly-generated world. There was nothing *worth* seeing, because virtually none of it was hand-built to have a purpose, or a history, or anything that’d set it apart. I might as well “explore” by rolling a die, and go “oo, a 5! That means I’ve just found a pretty place with trees and flowers and a river”.

And even if I did want a sandbox game like Oblivion is more than anything else, some of the gameplay flaws would still be unforgivable. Do I even need to say anything more than “auto-scaling”?

June 3rd, 2008 at 11:44 am

Bobsy says:

Most people have mentioned Oblivion, a lot mentioned Morrowind and a few mentioned Daggerfall, and I think the general consensus is that the game worlds have shrunk and the exploration part of the game has suffered as a result.

Sadly, I only ever played Oblivion, but even fresh to the series I ws disappointed with the tiny size of the game world. The only reason you couldn’t see one town from another was that the developers had plonked a great big hill in the way, to make you forget you were only a few minutes ride from the next village. And the edge of the world. Same with San Andreas – they can call it a “whole damn state” as much as they like, we all know it’s a tiny abstraction of one.

Of course, as technology gets better and the level of detail we demand in games like Oblivion increases, the hand-designed nature of these worlds means that there simply isn’t time to make a truly huge game world, and you end up with everything being so squashed in that you’re never more than 100 yards or so from a dungeon. Marked on the map. And on your compass.

I believe the solution here lies in procedurally-grown worlds. If Oblivion’s landscape was made procedurally rather than by hand it could have been created in half the time, and at least double the size.

Obviously the big procedural showcase this year is Spore, and there’s a lot riding on that game for the future of open worlds (or, in this case, galaxies). But possibly more important on a practical level is that project of Introversion’s. The cities being generated there are utterly incredible – easily dwarfing any in-game city to date.

The future of this technology is obvious, and very exciting – a russian doll style system where procedural wizardry generates a world, and in it a city, and in that a building, and in that furnishings…

All of which can be explored.

June 3rd, 2008 at 11:52 am

Ian says:

@ The Hammer: I was going to comment on the same thing and decided to post what I’d finished writing because I had to go do something else, and my laptop isn’t the most reliable interwebs device at the moment.

To a degree the problems WERE their own fault because press releases and preview material allowed the hype to sustain itself rather than calming things down. They kinda wanted a big blowout at the start than a stream of more more reserved reviews and commentary.

June 3rd, 2008 at 11:59 am

Feet says:

There has to be a reward for exploration for me. Even if it’s just a recognition that I found something that wouldn’t be found unless you were trying to explore off the track and obviously something significant at the end that makes you feel special having seen it. Just a message on screen saying “Hey you found it! ;D” would do.

I remember (and I’m sure most people did this at one time or another) spending 2 hours walking and swimming between the mountains and the ocean in WoW, I think it was around Dun Morough, starting in the Wetlands to the North and finishing up in Westfall. There was absolutely bugger all to see the whole way except for around midway when you come across a cottage with a little pier near it. I think there was a sign or the cottage had a cute name or something. It made it completely worth it. We spent 15 minutes emoting and jumping around near by. It would have been nice to have had something else there, like an NPC or something, but that was just enough.

Additionally there were other places in WoW that the persistant explorer could find. I cannot for the life of me remember where it was but you could find a vast valley with nothing in it, just one texture the whole way. I have a vague recollection of thinking it was in the shape of a dragon fallen to earth. No idea if that was the intention but there it is. And then in the early days there was a bug in Dun Morough that let you go to some farms and a waterfall that you could only see from a Griffon ride usually. I think there was a tunnel at the top that had nothing at all at the other end except empty blue. Obviously I threw myself off, my character fell for 4 minutes and then landed, and died from the fall. Another dead body of a previous explorer was at the bottom, another player had been here before me and had left his body there rather than respawning. Marvellous, laugh out loud moment.

June 3rd, 2008 at 12:02 pm

McCool says:

If theres one thing that really gets under my skin, it’s the bandwagon jumping Oblivion haters that have swarmed ever since Bethesda aquired the Fallout licence.

Yes, the Fallout and Elder Scrolls games are not the same type of RPG. Yeah, they do some very different things. And they should be judged on different critera.

Oblivion is a triumph, for all the reasons stated in this piece and more. It has brought hundreds of thousands (millions?) into the RPG fold. It’s taken a fistful of the RPG’s best qualities and rendered them so beautifully, so engagingly, that action-gaming fans all across the globe have become enraptured with playing an RPG. And thats a magic thing.

No, it isn’t the purest RPG ever, no there is very, VERY little meaningful roleplaying to be done. It’s never really been Beth’s strongpoint.

90% of people who play Oblivion don’t come back grumbling about dialogue choices. They’ve been shown half of the potential an RPG can have, a huge, free world, they’ve been allowed to write their own story, go where they want and do what they want -when they want. And crucially, It was fun.

It’s not like Oblivion is end-all of the genre. Every sign is that they are making pains to try and deliver something deeper with Fallout 3, and good luck to them. The more meaning and depth they can stuff into the Oblivion framework, the closer we are to gaming Nirvana.

June 3rd, 2008 at 12:07 pm

Chaz says:

I think the world in Oblivion is great, but like many others I thought that Morrowind was far superior. Oblivion’s world just feels far too crowded, dungeons seem to litter the landscape at every 50 paces, and you can’t get very far without attracting unwanted attention from some wandering monster. The other big problem with Oblivion is that there just isn’t enough variety in the landscape. It is just so much more of a plain old generic D&D style fantasy land when compared to Morrowind.

Boiling Point was another great game for just heading out and exploring in. Driving down muddy jungle dirt tracks and then heading off into the jungle on foot to explore was good fun. There were plenty of little places and ruins hidden away in the jungle, and you had to really get out there and hunt for them, but it gave you that thrill of discovery when you did eventually find something. Hopefully White Gold and Precursors will be just as fun to explore.

What I’d really like is an exploration game where you can build yourself a house. I often used to play Morrowind and come across spots that I thought would make great places to build myself a nice little dwelling. Somewhere I could just sit down and take in the view and soak up the ambiance. Of course many people did exactly that and built their own houses in Morrowind using the editor.

June 3rd, 2008 at 12:20 pm

McCool says:

Great post Rob, really pinning down exactly what Morrowind did better than Oblivion.
The other big thing is the level scaling. I remember back playing Morrowind, my meek low level character would stick to the cities whenever he could, or at least the roads. I’d/He’d heard the rumour about the dangerous daedric ruins far too many times, and everytime I saw those big, crimson jagged structures he’d/I’d shudder and persue a different route. The few times he/I dared to venture inside, he’d either die or barely escape alive.
That was immersion. Being to afraid to visit certain parts of the game, leveling up and training so that you can raid those ruins you’ve feared through half of the game. It’s core to the success of MMOs, and it was, in my opinion, completely foolish of Beth to have removed from the Elder Scrolls series. I think they’ve learnt their lesson, thankfully.

June 3rd, 2008 at 12:24 pm

Hypocee says:

It would probably be impolitic to mention C——– on RPS, but it fits this so hard.

June 3rd, 2008 at 12:36 pm

Meat Circus says:

@McCool:

It’s taken a fistful of the RPG’s best qualities and rendered them so beautifully, so engagingly, that action-gaming fans all across the globe have become enraptured with playing an RPG.

No, it took a fistful of the RPG’s best qualities, and pissed them up the wall in an attempt to appeal to the great unhosed.

I’m utterly baffled as to why Bethseda’s attempting to appeal to the mass market via a programme of extensive neutering and debasement of the RPG as a narrative experience is something any true lover of gaming would treat with anything other than contempt and horror.

If the true RPG is a dying genre, Oblivion will be one of the games that contributed most significantly to its decline.

June 3rd, 2008 at 12:45 pm

Dinger says:

Just because in most current games a computer sets up the world doesn’t mean it should be that way.

Open World: An open world game has elements that suggest the world has a life independent of its players. It’s the movie adaptation of The Lord of the Rings as opposed to that of Harry Potter: both had huge budgets, but in Harry Potter you got to see how the spent every last dime. In The Lord of the Rings, they’d bring stuff in from the book without exposition: it was just there, and you got the feeling that if you turned around, the world would continue.
In games, one of my reference points is the demo to Operation Flashpoint. You start out on a beach; a M113 mills about; a helicopter flies overhead. They have nothing to do with your story, but they’re there. You see villages in the distance; your map is bigger than the area of operations. That’s an open world: you’re not going to hit artificial walls and know it’s a “level.”

Oblivion is a great game. Yes, the map is “too small”, scale-wise. But “real scale” aside, it convinces the player (for a while) of its scope. The foreshortened landscape feels bigger than it really is. Little details, such as the arrangement of a village, or the distribution of vegetation, make us believe without thinking about

Open world games have limits. Outside of the missions (errr… “quests”), there are a limited amount of ways the player can interact with the environment in Oblivion Operation Flashpoint someone would, say import the San Juan Islands, and populate it with trees, towns and roads, and we’d go on a six-hour recon mission, dodging enemy patrols, and never quite knowing what we’d find, but by the fifth time, no surprises were left. And in any case, we knew what we’d find would behave according to a limited set of rules we knew pretty well.

Those rules, I suspect, hold the answer to Jim’s question:

Would anyone pay for a game that was created in the name of aimless wandering tourism? Could anything in a game world be interesting enough just to go and look at? I wonder what the minimum threshold of activity, the minimum amount of danger and challenge a virtual landscape has to offer to be considered a game?

“Aimless wandering tourism” will not work in a dead world. The exploration you describe is an exploration of the rules according to which a world operates — what kinds of houses appear where, what vegetation there is, weather patterns, what do NPCs do to each other, where do those cars go? Exploration becomes interesting when we discover the boundaries of those rules, or instances that break them: there’s a forest of giant sequoia only in this valley; this person’s daily routine involves working in the shop till six, then wandering through the park, eating and sleeping; this cemetery glows orange between 1 and 2 in the morning.

Okay, I’ve been playing Hitman: Blood Money lately, and it shows: each level there is a world, a mechanism designed to be explored, tinkered with, and shot up, just to see how it works. You explore the levels, but also the game itself: if I throw this hammer at someone, will it kill that person?

So pure tourism? I’ve known people to play a mission of Operation Flashpoint where they take a car and go on a driving tour of a peaceful island. But people normally want more than that. Exploring the real world is interested, not the least because you can interact with the world you explore and socialize with others you encounter; and humans, like other animals, use games to explore the rules governing socialization. Video games offer the chance for exploration, but that exploration is as much of the rules governing the game as of the world it presents.
But developers can only anticipate a limited number of interactions with canned responses. To go beyond that, you need other humans; hence part of the appeal of MMORPGS. But even in those cases, the missions are canned; to open horizons further, you need a human in the loop. (and in many of the more interesting narratives of MMORPG events, the people running the game play an active role) In graphically based MP combat simulations, going back at least to Air Warrior, major events had a human or team of humans running the thing live, not just fixing bugs, but compensating for the limitations of the game environment, and reacting immediately to the players’ unexpected actions. With OFP (and now with ArmA), the first thing I did once we got networking services running was to make a console that could modify the game state of any of the players connected: in a multiplayer game, if the players (or the cursed AI) deviate from the pre-established script, why not allow a “Mission Manager” to create a believable reaction?
Why not make more MP games where someone can play the role of “DM”?

June 3rd, 2008 at 12:47 pm

Feet says:

There are NWN2 servers, like Haze, that allow players to design mission and GM themselves I think.

http://www.nwn2haze.com/index.php

June 3rd, 2008 at 12:52 pm

Ian says:

On STALKER (a game I really need to go back and play properly as I’ve hardly scratched the surface) the things I remember are things I saw and discovered, rather than the combat. I’ll be modding it a bit when I get back to it as I tired of grunts being able to shoot the ballhair off a sparrow from a thousand paces when the sparrow is under a bush, but the desolate feeling of some things made the running about more than worth while. Looking at a big wrecked building and both feeling a little sad at what’s happened and wondering whether there’s something which will try to kill you if you go in there.

As for WoW in terms of exploration, I’ve had a few moments where I’ve really enjoyed just taking in the view of the area I’m in. When I was still a proper newbie dwarf in Dun Morogh I was scaling a hill as a shortcut, and then looked out over a frozen lake, snowy trees and whatever else and thought the whole thing was beautiful. I’ll see bigger and more spectacular things in WoW as I go along and get to higher level areas, but that’s the one that sticks with me from a roaming around point of view.

June 3rd, 2008 at 12:58 pm

Andrew Farrell says:

Shalkis: Dude, there is so much shit in WoW that is just there for exploration! It’s one of the reasons I started in the first place, an enormous list of easter eggs on a forum somewhere.

June 3rd, 2008 at 1:02 pm

Nick says:

“and still haven’t finished the main quest!”

Don’t worry, it’ll only take an hour.

June 3rd, 2008 at 1:08 pm

Albides says:

Taximan

So if you want something to do, try to access the concept-artist Michael Kirkbride’s former website a…He’s the one who designed the trippy mushroom architecture and organic-foldy buildings as well as some of the more evil-morrowindized-mutated creatures and fauna like the bull-netches etc.

Another Michael Kirkbride groupie? The guy is a friend of mine and much more than just a concept artist. He also wrote that Pocket Guide to the Empire, as well as some of Morrowind and Oblivion’s more original in-game texts, like The 36 Sermons of Vivec, The Monomyth, and the Mythic Dawn Commentaries. It’s a sore point of some fans of Elder Scrolls lore that he left the company after Morrowind, though he still writes texts for Bethesda and appears every now and then to give us (by which I mean the forum) new stories.

Oh, and if you’re interested in more of Michael concept art, here’s an online version of the art book that came with the collector’s edition of Morrowind.

It also a particularly soar point that Oblivion’s vision of Cyrodiil in no way matches the wonder of the image in the Pocket Guide:

Refayj’s famous declaration, “There is but one city in the Imperial Province,–” may strike the citizens of the Colovian west as mildly insulting, until perhaps they hear the rest of the remark, which continues, “–but one city in Tamriel, but one city in the World; that, my brothers, is the city of the Cyrodiils.” From the shore it is hard to tell what is city and what is Palace, for it all rises from the islands of the lake towards the sky in a stretch of gold. Whole neighborhoods rest on the jeweled bridges that connect the islands together. Gondolas and river-ships sail along the watery avenues of its flooded lower dwellings. Moth-priests walk by in a cloud of ancestors; House Guards hold exceptionally long daikatanas crossed at intersections, adorned with ribbons and dragon-flags; and the newly arrived Western legionnaires sweat in the humid air. The river mouth is tainted red from the tinmi soil of the shore, and river dragons rust their hides in its waters. Across the lake the Imperial City continues, merging into the villages of the southern red river and ruins left from the Interregnum.

The Emperor’s Palace is a crown of sun rays, surrounded by his magical gardens. One garden path is known as Green Emperor Road-here, topiaries of the heads of past Emperors have been shaped by sorcery and can speak. When one must advise Tiber Septim, birds are drawn to the hedgery head, using their songs as its voice and moving its branches for the needed expressions.

Indeed, you can still find references to Cyrodiil being a jungle kingdom in Oblivion. In fact, many of the longtime fans feel Bethesda sold out and lost all sense of creativity when Michael left.

June 3rd, 2008 at 1:11 pm

Crispy says:

Tom Francis had talked about the moment he’d be most fond of in replaying the game: coming out of the underground tutorial into the bright, beautiful gameworld. “You get this incredible feeling of freedom,” he said. “It’s wide open and it feels like anything is possible.”

I got the same feeling in Unreal on exiting the crashed spaceship into a canyon with waterfalls, vibrant colours and what seemed in those days to be an expanse of space. In fact I seem to recall either a PCZ or a PCG reviewer recounting exactly the same experience.

June 3rd, 2008 at 1:27 pm

Xagarath says:

I did enjoy the exploration aspects of Morrowind and Oblivion, but Oblivion did feel, for me, that the landscape was being procedurally generated after a while, which was something of a shame.
Shadow of the Colossus, however- there was a landscape I would go and explore just for the sake of seeing it, simply because the whole was a work of artistic design in its own right. I can think of few other games that took that approach.

June 3rd, 2008 at 1:41 pm

Pags says:

Google Earth is the greatest exploration game ever, no question.

June 3rd, 2008 at 1:44 pm

internisus says:

A lovely, highly agreeable statement, this post is. Jim, have you played Ico and Shadow of the Colossus? Dreaded consoles, yes yes, but I strongly recommend them for you. The place of Ico forces me to move through it with slowly, with reverence, walking quietly across its vast spaces when I could ease the analog stick forward and break into a bumbling run with no effort.

June 3rd, 2008 at 1:55 pm

kadayi says:

Personally I can’t say I cared too much for Oblivion the game, but I understand where Jim is coming from with respect to Oblivion the environment (though the City was dire). Personally I’m completely addicted to exploring virtual space in games, if nothing more than to marvel, at the vistas when the sun comes up over the mountains, or discover the hidden gems developers often put into games.. Open world games provide one with the freedom to trespass.

It’s a pity the thread seems to have been hijacked by people determined to bash ‘Oblivion the game’ rather than discuss ‘Oblivion the environment’ unfortunately.

Google Earth is the greatest exploration game ever, no question.

There is some truth to that. It’s kind of fun to scoot over LA and Beverley hills and pick out the sites.

June 3rd, 2008 at 2:05 pm

Meat Circus says:

@Alec:

See, I quite understand that there exist game journalists who genuinely liked Oblivion (they are, of course, wrong, but that’s their own lookout.)

However, that this game was getting near-universal acclaim, when the evidence of this thread and much, much other discontent is that it was not *nearly* deserving of it, suggests to me that something went wrong at the point where the game and its reviewers intersect.

Halo 3 is rather easier to understand, of course, since most game journos are exactly the sort of lowest common denominator sexually frustrated young men that Halo 3 was aimed at. Present company excepted, of course.

June 3rd, 2008 at 2:15 pm

garren says:

One of the reasons why Oblivion is so hated by many RPG-enthusiasts is that it has very little of the RPG part and a big slice of open world goodness. Like wandering around the big landscape killing monsters? Good for you. If that’s all you want from Oblivion and slap 10/10 to it, go ahead. But once you strip down the big exploration aspect and random generic dungeons, you will see that the game has very little left to offer.

“Fantasy to us is riding around horseback and killing things”
- Todd Howard

June 3rd, 2008 at 2:17 pm

kadayi says:

@meat Circus

It seems to me you need to learn the difference between what is a fact (’the sun emits light & heat’) and what’s an opinion (’Cats are ace!!’), and not mistake the latter for the former.

June 3rd, 2008 at 2:24 pm

Cooper says:

Thanks for writing this, I’ve been thinking over the same things recently, having re-installed Stalker a couple of weeks back. It’s a games which is begging for you to explore. The landscapes are of an amazing detail, there’s far, far much more to find than the storyline would lead you to. Yet, as has been said, the overabundance of mutants early, the run-and-gunning last-half, and the general lack of incentives (beyond a desire to explore) means so much of this gets missed. Unlike Oblivion, you would never wander across rewards in Stalker, aside from the reward of seeing new things, and new A-Life events. I’m not sure that’s enough – not for most players.

I would love more exploration games. Oblivion without the storyline, but with the kind of self-directed a-life stalker promised would be an amazing game. It’s not novel to suggest that many players make their own, emergent stories through playing. One day, I hope, a developer will go wholesale on this and remove any notion of overarching narrative, and allow for self-explroation, spatial exploration and emergent stories in a proecural world.

June 3rd, 2008 at 2:27 pm

Paul Moloney says:

“See, I quite understand that there exist game journalists who genuinely liked Oblivion (they are, of course, wrong)”

How can you be _wrong_ for liking something?

I like Bakewell tart. Is this right or wrong?

“I would suggest that when a game that is seen as flawed by so many people (yes, including myself) received such uncritical acclaim from so many game journalists, something went wrong somewhere.”

Has there been any artistic creation in history that some people didn’t think were any good? There are people think that “Ulysses” and “The Mona Lisa” are shite.

Sorry, but you’re coming across as one of those Fallout zealots.

P.

June 3rd, 2008 at 2:32 pm

Cigol says:

I personally thought Morrowind was horrid! The game was buggy, had a host of performance related issues, the combat was piss-poor and much of the environment and its characters were absolutely ridiculous – not to mention all of the monotonous text devoid of life. I was genuinely in love with the concept and I tried as hard as I could to get pulled into the world, but beyond strolling around the countryside it never quite clicked for me and so my memory of it is tainted to say the least – but I don’t think it’s a bad game, I just don’t like it.

On the other hand, Oblivion for me was fantastic. The graphics were sublime, the performance issues and bugs were gone and the combat was much more satisfying. It was a far more visceral experience and for a first person RPG that’s crucial (otherwise what the fuck are you doing in a first person perspective?) – yes it was light on role playing elements, yes it’s underlying structure was geared exclusively towards action and yes it didn’t live up to the hype, but that doesn’t alter what is a great game when taken at face value.

Criticism related to Oblivion is either baggage concerning the pre-release hype or expectations of what it should or could have been rather than what it actually is. I am not happy about Oblivion being the precursor to Fallout 3, not one bit, but to say that Oblivion is a bad game is silly – it’s an extremely polished and enjoyable title.

Still, I’m not looking forward to them dropping a huge big steaming pile of shit on the Fallout franchise :D

June 3rd, 2008 at 2:40 pm

Paul Moloney says:

“Bakewell tart is just fantastic.”

When I went to visit an old friend in Sheffield (from Dublin) once, she asked what I wanted to do, and my suggestion was a day-trip to Bakewell. That’s how much I like them.

Cigol: You summed up for me my Oblivion vs. Morrowind feelings; I think the key word there is “visceral”; I found the combat in Morrowind particularly awful. I’ll probably try one day to play it again though.

P.

June 3rd, 2008 at 2:48 pm

Ian says:

@ Meat Circus: I don’t think he (kadayi) was arguing that Oblivion shouldn’t ever be perceived as a bad game by people, more your daft “See, I quite understand that there exist game journalists who genuinely liked Oblivion (they are, of course, wrong …)” comment.

June 3rd, 2008 at 2:52 pm

Meat Circus says:

@McCool:

So, to you, gaming is all about the lowest common denominator, race-to-the-bottom prolefeed?

I don’t mind giving the great unhosed their bread and circuses through slapdash mediocrity. But I really wish certain more egalitarian aspects of the games-as-art type would stop pretending such games are anything more when they really aren’t.

A review like: Oblivion is a piece of mediocre piffle for mediocre people, and they’ll find it pleasantly distracting from their mediocre lives. Anybody who cares about gaming as an art form, however, won’t (or shouldn’t) find anything to commend here.

Honest, to the point, and covers all bases.

June 3rd, 2008 at 2:54 pm

John P (Katsumoto) says:

I wish I was as cool as you! As it is I may as well commit suicide. ;)

p.s. as you would say, you are utterly and objectively WRONG. The Empire Strikes back is clearly not only miles ahead of the other Star Wars films, but of most films. Got you there! ;)

June 3rd, 2008 at 2:58 pm

Paul Moloney says:

“Oblivion is a piece of mediocre piffle for mediocre people”

I bet you wear black and _hate_ your parents too.

P.

June 3rd, 2008 at 3:04 pm

Pags says:

Meat Circus, it’s hard to retain any credibility when you cite Return of the Jedi as the best of the original Star Wars trilogy.

June 3rd, 2008 at 3:06 pm

Ian says:

A review like: Oblivion is a piece of mediocre piffle for mediocre people, and they’ll find it pleasantly distracting from their mediocre lives. Anybody who cares about gaming as an art form, however, won’t (or shouldn’t) find anything to commend here.

Honest, to the point, and covers all bases.

Congratulations, you’re pretentious!

Oblivion has flaws all over the shop and not all of them in ways that make it broken, but to suggest nobody can enjoy it purely as easy mindless fun without being in your “mediocre person” category is laughable.

I’ll try not to take too long because with your non-mediocre life you’re probably only reading this during a break between supping Dom Pérignon from the navel of a supermodel or whatever it is those enjoying the very pinnacle of existence do when they’re not discussing important things like the meaning of life and which first-person RPG-alikes are best.

You appear to believe well-rounded people can only enjoy games that are the best on offer and that anything not considered fine art scarcely worth acknowledging unless it’s to spew verbal bile over it. Plenty of people enjoy magnificent symphonies or the classic novels, I suspect that doesn’t mean they refuse to allow themselves to enjoy a bit of simple piano music or a Frederick Forsyth novel.

June 3rd, 2008 at 3:08 pm

cyrenic says:

Several people have mentioned ICO and Shadow of the Colossus (they are fair game because GTAIV was mentioned!), and I want to echo the sentiment that they are some of the best exploring games out there. Especially SotC. You could see something that looked cool in the distance, run out to it, and likely find a lizard or fruit to improve your character’s stats. The subtle direction of your sword was also perfect for directing you towards your next goal while encouraging exploration.

June 3rd, 2008 at 3:12 pm

Paul Moloney says:

“bourgeois entertainment”

No, you really _do_ wear black.

P.

June 3rd, 2008 at 3:20 pm

Meestercat says:

Pags, your Sarcasm Fu is weak, old man.

All this talk of Oblivion has made me want actually play it now. For the first time.

@ Feet: Never try swimming from Darkshore to Winterspring though…. I’ll never get that hour back…

June 3rd, 2008 at 3:21 pm

Ian says:

“The thing is, gaming is a young art form, but not young enough that the division between prolefeed and bourgeois entertainment that we make for all other art forms shouldn’t have found its way here yet.”

Are you sure it’s not just that the rest of the snobs who don’t actually like anything, only dislike some things less than others, haven’t all developed their utterly detestable personalties yet?

Between the likes of yourself and those who will guzzle up anything Gamespot accepts money to review well (or is that a myth? I prepare to be corrected) there is a large gaming demographic of people who can accept the difference between “prolefeed” and “bourgeois entertainment” (what the rest of us call a “very good game”, a phrase you might need to remember should you ever have the misfortune to find yourself amongst us surface-dwellers.)

Purely out of interest and at risk of taking this off-topic even further, which games do you deem to have just enough good points (against the life-ruiningly awful, of course) to survive the game holocaust you’re presumably planning to instigate?

June 3rd, 2008 at 3:25 pm

Pags says:

I would guess that the reason Empire didn’t have a beginning or an ending is because it’s the second film of a trilogy, ie. the middle.

June 3rd, 2008 at 3:29 pm

Chris Livingston says:

Wow. Another fantastic article, Jim. Once again, you’ve made me want to ditch work and play games all day.

I’ve actually been playing Oblivion recently with the “minimum threshold of activity” you mention, and quite enjoying the experience — playing as an NPC, avoiding quests, and trying to make a living that doesn’t involve looting dungeons. (The resulting blog was mentioned in PCGUK last month but just for any interested members of your readership, it’s called Living in Oblivion.)

Oblivion is great for exploring because it rewards you — there are all sorts of neat little places to find, journals to read, mysteries to solve. A lot of games, like Crysis and Just Cause, are celebrated for their huge game worlds, but there’s not much point of a giant landmass unless there are rewards for exploring it.

June 3rd, 2008 at 3:36 pm

Darius K. says:

I think Mafia was a pretty fantastic “check out the architecture” game. The gameplay itself was pretty good, too.

June 3rd, 2008 at 3:39 pm

Ian says:

It’s not the people I think you’ll have exterminated, it’s the ‘bad’ games themselves. ;)

And that Living in Oblivion blog is ace, by the way.

June 3rd, 2008 at 3:52 pm

Riff says:

Rule 1: Don’t feed the troll.

June 3rd, 2008 at 4:03 pm

Ian says:

Well…. I guess Oblivion doesn’t let you take down super-advanced space mechs with logs. :(

June 3rd, 2008 at 4:10 pm

Meat Circus says:

@Riff:

Tish and fipsy. If you consider this trolling, you must have a sheltered internet existence.

@Nick:

Yes.

@Ian:

Which, you have to admit, was in hindsight a mistake.

June 3rd, 2008 at 4:14 pm

Lightbulb says:

Bobsy (and others) Oblivion WAS procedurally generated. Thats WHY its so bland, and the dungeons are all the same.

June 3rd, 2008 at 4:18 pm

Paul Moloney says:

“I made a concious decision playing Oblivion to do the same thing, and walked to all the cities the first time I went to them”

Ummmm, as far as I’m aware, fast travelling only works when you’ve already visited your destination once. So you would have had to travel there by foot/horse once anyway.

P.

June 3rd, 2008 at 4:28 pm

Dyrwen says:

I’m hoping that Spore will allow for a kind of scientific exploration, as well as give pause to the cause of exploration for planetary success’ sake. It feels like the perfect exploration game, in between the evolution, but we shall see when it comes out.

June 3rd, 2008 at 4:32 pm

Meat Circus says:

@Tak:

And you dare have the audacity to claim, in your infinite mid-twenties wisdom, that you can define what is and is not art in a medium that is fifty years old?

Define? Perhaps not. Recognise? Yes. In any case, I never said “I”, I said “we”. We recognize what is and what isn’t lowest common denominator in all other art forms.

That we don’t yet do this is in gaming is, I suggest, less about the lack of maturity of gaming, more about the lack of maturity of gamers.

Also, early thirties, so squish.

June 3rd, 2008 at 5:14 pm

Benjamin Barker says:

When it was new, a certain “hive mind” of Oblivion naysayers (you know who I’m taking about) liked to derisively call it a “hiking simulator”– but it seems that’s what a certain audience subset, at least, wanted. The problem for me is when that’s too prominent the game part is left out– you know: rules, challenge, goals. But “hiking simulator” and game can be reconciled: I once tried the 1980 PC game Wilderness, which really was a hiking simulator– survive by creating shelter, hanging your food out of bear-reach, navigate by an elevation map, compass, or the constellations. Avoid dehydration and exhaustion. It makes reaching anywhere satisfying exploration whether you find a shack or not because it was hard to make it there. This meant it was a game, the point being survival and reaching your goal. Somebody should remake it with Oblivion graphics, or make such a mod from it (unless it already perhaps exists) then we’d have a game Mr. Rossignol and I would both be happy with.

June 3rd, 2008 at 5:27 pm

Ian says:

One thing which would make me tentative about more games having rewards for exploring (like an expanded version of the few XP points WoW drops on you for finding Goblin’s Nutsack Glade or whatever) is that then it just makes it anothet thing to do. Relentlessly running to certain places without it even being a fetch quest because you’re trying to hit certain places to get perks.

Ideally, games in big worlds should be fun whether or not you choose to go on the wander, and those who like simply exploring can do so if they want and it not being something that will make or break your experience.

Or alternatively, using some of the ideas from the above post by BB.

June 3rd, 2008 at 5:33 pm

Plant42 says:

I liked Oblivion, I consider it a solid B or B . It starts off with a bang, the graphics are mighty impressive, but somewhere around 30 hours or so you realize the cookie-cutter nature of the towns, monsters and dungeons and things start to look and feel like a 3d Diablo clone. Add to this the repetitive quests (play enough Warcraft and someone having you kill a monster or deliver an item makes you instantly slip into ‘this is boring work’ mode), and the laughably bad NPCs and dialogue… sorry I just don’t have any hope for Fallout 3.

Fallout was not a success due to retro 50s styling or a Mad Max atmosphere. Fallout pulled off a mood due to uncanny character development, impeccable settings and mood and razor-sharp writing, story and dark humor that few (Portal) games can pull off.

Oblivion’s main story is flat, the NPCs cookie cutter ‘I’m a fearsome warrior captain’ or ‘I’m a mystical archmage’ stereotype with 10 lines of dialogue.

Yeah… I just don’t hold out much hope. It’s looking like Fallout 3 will have gorgeous graphics, a semi-expansive area to explore and a whole lot of flat, boring people to talk to about how ‘nuclear waste has ruined the nearby river and turned the local wildlife into mutant monsters, and could you please go kill them and rescue my kid… I’ll give you this leather jacket in return…’

June 3rd, 2008 at 5:48 pm

Benjamin Barker says:

Must correct myself a bit. It is a fascinating curio if one cares to look it up. “Wilderness: A Survival Adventure” 1985/86 for Apple II and DOS. http://www.mobygames.com/game/wilderness-a-survival-adventure

June 3rd, 2008 at 5:53 pm

Meat Circus says:

One can hope indeed.

Every night I say a little prayer to Space Jesus that Bethseda never gets it into their heads to do a Planescape game.

I’m not sure I could bear that.

June 3rd, 2008 at 5:57 pm

Derek K. says:

See, for me:

“Tom Francis had talked about the moment he’d be most fond of in replaying the game: coming out of the underground tutorial into the bright, beautiful gameworld. “You get this incredible feeling of freedom,” he said. “It’s wide open and it feels like anything is possible.””

is a horrible argument.

I have a life, wherein I can randomly wander about. I don’t really want a game world that says “Here – we made some stuff. Go, like, do whatever.”

I know it’s the trend, and the thing most people like. But I want a quest journal that I can put checkmarks beside. I want to walk out of the tutorial, and have 10-15 people that need things which I can provide.

And I know that the main quest is basically irrelevant. So even that part of the journal is useless. So far, I’ve made about 10 oblivion characters, and managed to get one quest in the main city, and do a couple things for the guilds. All of which I knew would be there, and none of which excites me.

I *want* to love Oblivion. But I just can’t. I don’t have time for random wandering about until I find teh kewlest thng evar ™

@Ian:

“One thing which would make me tentative about more games having rewards for exploring (like an expanded version of the few XP points WoW drops on you for finding Goblin’s Nutsack Glade or whatever) is that then it just makes it anothet thing to do. Relentlessly running to certain places without it even being a fetch quest because you’re trying to hit certain places to get perks.”

There’s an elite unique in Nutsack glade that drops White Milky Potions. It’s worth it.

I agree with that. It’s a puzzler. Mass Effect had achievements and quests to find X of Y items – heavy metals, light metals, etc. It meant that I was forced to land on each and every planet, and explore each and every bit of landscape, because there might be a quest tick, or loot.

I can’t leave ticks or loot undone. I am currently *very* upset with KotOR II, because I went to Onderan *before* I finished one of the Mandalorian quests. And I can’t complete it now. It will forever sit as a black mark on my quest journal (I’m playing KoTOR II for about the 10th time, cause it rocks).

June 3rd, 2008 at 6:07 pm

SwiftRanger says:

” Tom Francis had talked about the moment he’d be most fond of in replaying the game: coming out of the underground tutorial into the bright, beautiful gameworld. “You get this incredible feeling of freedom,” he said. “It’s wide open and it feels like anything is possible.” ”

I think pretty much everyone had that great feeling once they got out that tutorial and I can honestly say I did enjoy most of the 40 hours I put into Oblivion but in the end it felt too meaningless, even as an action/adventure (it stops feeling like an RPG pretty quickly) there was barely anything unique about any of the dungeons (or even the locations) except for their labyrinth layout and some traps/levelled encounters. Anything is possible? That feeling really goes away as you keep playing more. You try to play on but it’s of no use, you’ll realise you still have so many copy-cat locations to clear out it’s not gonna be interesting anymore. Even the handful interesting quests get borked because of this. Gothic 3 f.e. simply had a better “world feeling” in this regard.

As far as bitching goes about Oblivion’s raving reviews; I think most people would agree with the assumption that the game can be a lot of fun but not that it would earn the 10/10 scores or that “pinnacle of RPG’s” or “best open-ended game” description which so many press folks (at first) thought it deserved. In fact, I would even call it a huge disgrace compared to how older classics à la BGII, Planescape: Torment or Fallout, which all meant a lot more to the genre, were treated in the press. The Oblivion-hype was stronger, probably because of the Xbox360 crowd shouting loudly about it as well. Really, it dawns on you that the game keeps on piling up the flaws the more you play it and that’s just a big shame. Oblivion is easily as much of a missed chance as Gothic 3 or Vampire: Bloodlines are, all for different reasons of course. I don’t know if mods could solve everything, maybe someone should try to make a list of the best fanmade stuff which make TES IV as it should have been.

June 3rd, 2008 at 6:14 pm

Tak says:

@Meat

You’re right in that you said ‘we’. I rescind the personal nature of the attack, but not the sentiment.

Before you can determine if something has any merit as entertainment or art, you have to have a fairly full understanding of it’s capabilities. It takes a stability and maturity of the medium, and most importantly, a variety of perspectives on the same particular example from that medium, to determine if something is merely art or entertainment. Written language is fairly stable (though ever changing), and we’ve had it for a painfully long time. We can look back on something written hundreds of years ago and put our modern perspective on it. We can compare and contrast that with the thoughts from generations before ours. That’s how you determine when something is ‘art’ and when it is entertainment.

Did this piece start a new trend? Did it impact the world in a meaningful way? Did it inspire a great event? Did it bring an unfortunate position to light? Does it give a deeper meaning? It takes years, decades, perhaps centuries to determine if something stands up to that test. Everything else is just a flash in the pan. “Fair Phyllis” was a popular riot and a right naughty piece in its heyday, but you’d hardly consider it meaningful art. Shakespeare was vastly popular among the unwashed (mostly, because hardly anyone washed) masses, and is from the same period, but his works are almost universally considered art with a big ‘A’.

I’m not saying that Oblivion is or isn’t a work of art. I think it’s an obvious technical achievement and a beautiful piece of eye candy, and a fun game for exploring. But what will determine if something is art or not will be if, twenty or fifty or a hundred years from now, people are still playing Oblivion. Will the nature of the medium *even allow* games to become ‘art’ in that way? Or are we doomed to have each generation enjoy it’s own works?

Some of the last bit are more questions that apply to the digital age as a whole, and I wager a guess that no one on this thread or perhaps even born today will be alive to see what the end result of all ‘this’ is.

If, when we die, there is some kind of a space-floaty-afterlife-thingy (hah, I say, hah! :p), we can look back on this spec of dirt after all that time and make that call. Until then, you nor I nor any other group has the ability to tell if a video game is art.

This is really just a ‘touch on the basics’ overview of the whole thing, but this is a topic that has come up before with some friends and one that is actually worth discussing. I’d be surprised if there weren’t books about it.

I love where we are with gaming, and agree that it could be *so* much better, but who’s to say that what we call gaming now isn’t going to fall out of favor like scapulamancy? Something entirely new could replace gaming *tomorrow*. The written and spoken word, painting, architecture, music, those have stood the test of time and are very unlikely to go away any time soon. For all we know, we’re running our berry-stained fingers over the walls, and celebrating our latest kill.

In short, I apologize again for making the attack personal, but I could not disagree more with the sentiment that we can call a game art or not.

EDIT: Something can still be popular, good, bad, artistic (but that doesn’t make it art), or any other adjective you’d like to assign. And of course, games are ‘art’ in that someone created them, for some purpose, and shared them with others. A child’s stick figure finger-paint is also art in that sense. I’m talking about the implied deeper meaning of art as something that causes an effect.

June 3rd, 2008 at 6:30 pm

Kadayi says:

YHTBTR (as featured here at RPS) is probably about the only game that I can think of (off the top of my head) that possibly qualifies for discussion as game made art (in the modern sense), in that it’s a comment on itself and the very nature of a game. It’s no longer about the objective, it’s about the experience (whimsical as it is).

http://www.mazapan.se/games/BurnTheRope.php

@meat circus

Make a game. Show them (Valve, Maxis, Bioware,Rockstar, etc etc) how it should be done.

June 3rd, 2008 at 7:39 pm

Tak says:

You’re right about the worry bit. I’m not going to worry about it either, so we’re in the middle on that one ;) But as a topic of nerdy goodness, it’s hard to be for a nice night’s discussion.

I have to ask though, what makes admitting the fun or worthlessness of something a stunted view?

Shakespeare wasn’t setting out to write grand tales that would taught as their own classes, he was looking to eat and get popular enough to get a little on the side. Likewise, the hunched over stinking masses weren’t packed shoulder-to-shoulder in the globe to blast his plays for their appeal to the violent and prurient (and keep in mind the time period, some of his implied and stated notions were down-right vile, socially speaking). They were just there to enjoy it.

Art, as a whole, is a leisure activity. From story telling to video-games. It often serves a dual purpose, especially in the case of the former, and can certainly serve to in the case of the latter, but the primary use of things considered ‘art’ is providing entertainment.

Think back to all of the various works of art that you can think of that are highly regarded, outside of the video game industry. How many of them were created with the notion of ‘I am going to send a message, make a statement’? Outside of religious works, you will find very, very few. There have been powerful works created when such is the motivation, yes, and such is the case for games (Indy and school-group games touching on things like Darfur, for instance), but I’m hard pressed to come up with an example off the top of my head that fits the classification. Some of the Vietnam-era protest music, maybe? Some damn fine songs, and they certainly belong in any case study of the time, but I wager you won’t find concert hall recitals or museum collections centered around an original hand-written copy of the “Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag” in the future. Are there any ‘I’m going to do it’ pieces that have stood the test of time?

What, in your view, makes a game art? Where do you draw that line? For a game to be artistic do you look at the mechanics? The theme? The narrative? Any one of those can be artistic in itself, but what if the other two are garbage?

Expand the argument further than Oblivion, forget Oblivion. You didn’t like it and you feel like it got too much praise, fair enough. I’m curious about this (as I mentioned before, it’s a great topic for a night’s talk)

June 3rd, 2008 at 7:47 pm

Pete says:

I think the best chance you are going to get at such a vast explorable realm is going to be an MMO that is like old muds. Give players the keys to make truly unique areas with a meaningful purpose connected to the overall game.

June 3rd, 2008 at 7:50 pm

Erlam says:

I still cannot believe people like Oblivion – the sheer amount of things that either fucked up, didn’t work at all, or were just plain awful (more guards in the capital city than citizens comes to mind), to the hilariously designed (137 arrows in a wolf, and it was still attacking me).

I will play through STALKER again though. I love exploring; my friend showed me a way pretty much at the start of the game to make it all the way through a certain radioactive area long before you should be able to.

Love it.

June 3rd, 2008 at 8:29 pm

Alarik says:

Regarding exploration RPGs – I love exploration in Wizardry 7 CoDS and in Albion. You can crawl through some forgotten dungeons, or mazes, or bushes, or mountains, or rivers, or seas (eh, yes, Wizardry 7 :) and you can find rare treasures, tough encounters and various surprises.

Oblivion was terrible in this regard – world seems fine on the first few (or rather a lot) looks, but pretty soon there were no surprises (basically, there were almost no artefacts or items worth mentioning or looking for (and those few were offered by Daedra quests – automatically showed on your automap) – compared to Morrowind where artefact searching was pretty entertaining) – bar one helm in the sea >_> And that random (crappy) item generator was terrible. Random item generation is suitable for action RPGs, but not for “classical” RPGs (well, Oblivion is rather action RPG… hmm…). Beautiful world without soul…

June 3rd, 2008 at 8:45 pm

Ninja Dodo says:

I can’t believe nobody’s mentioned Little Big Adventure yet! It and its sequel were explore-tastic. Thanks to the big red arrows on your map indicating broadly where things needed doing, you were never lost but mostly where to go was up to you. A game ahead of its time in many ways.

I’m finding more and more this is what I look for in a game… to visit interesting places and interact with interesting characters. I wasn’t especially stoked about the abilities in Bioshock (nothing I hadn’t seen before) but Rapture, the place, was what finally drew me in. Assassin’s Creed while by no means a perfect game is just too much fun to run around in.

The Gothic series in particular, much more so than The Elder Scrolls (Morrowind being the game I’m familiar with), did a great job of putting ‘character’ in the landscapes. There was not a cliff that was not utterly unique. You could look at almost any shot and instantly recognize where it was, and as has been mentioned you were frequently rewarded for going off the beaten track.

Gothic 3 floundered a bit in that regard, but the first two and add-on Night of the Raven are most worthy of exploration.

June 3rd, 2008 at 9:07 pm

Acosta says:

Great topic Jim,

Exploration is one of the key points why I love videogames to the point of making my life around them. No other medium can offer this potential, transporting you to a world and letting you freely explore it. Of course, is not the only thing I love from them but it’s a big point for me.

I think that my first exploring experience with a games was with Pirates! I became fascinated with that game, there is a point of inflexion at this point, because suddenly games passed from being great to being something else. I could explore for the shake of doing it and I could forge my destiny, just limited by the game’s ruleset. From that moment it always has been a huge point for me and transformed my valoration of certain games. Assasin’s Creed (without the HUD) it´s really fantastic for people who love exploration and pay attention for the details.

My love for MMOs comes for the simple reason of them being the games with bigger focus on the worldcraft. Huge, expansive worlds full of secrets, mountains to climb and isles to visit. I will never forget the first time I entered into Feralas, in World of Warcraft, entering with my horse in that mysterious, gigantic forest. Age of Conan is being quite interesting too, love the climbing ability and I have been able to explore some really interesting places in Tortage (Aqueronian’s ruins is quite awe inspiring).

However, my favorite thing is when I can claim domination of a part of that world and I am truly able to influence it with my acts, without being poked by the story. Elder’s Scrolls has been great for this, offering me the possibility to claim my own place and explore the world at my own pace. I can understand the criticism to Bethesda, since Daggerfall they have improved the stability of their games at the same rate they have been cutting on the ambition of their vision, but they still respect the core of their ideas and Oblivion is still great to me (specially when combined with Shattered Islands). Hopefully, now they are much better with the polish of their games, they will recover some of their most ambitious objectives.

Loved what Tim Edwards wrote in PCG of June, about wanting to retire to cruise between imaginary planets and fictional words, I really can identify myself with that feeling.

June 3rd, 2008 at 9:40 pm

Peregrine81 says:

http://www.quelsolaar.com/love/index.html

Remeber this? This is what you want :)

June 3rd, 2008 at 10:31 pm

Po0py says:

I remember one of my first of many unfruitfull attempts at playing WoW, having found it difficult to get into, I decided that I would see if I could swim/walk from Undercity to Stormwind. I swam and walked all the way down the east coast of the island. It took forever. Wilst walking along the base of a cliff next to the sea in Dun Morogh (I think?) I came across an Alliance player. We didn’t fight. We just danced a little and went on our way. He was probably trying to get himself from Stormwind to Undercity for the same reason I was trying to get from Undercity to Stormwind. Just because I could.

And I did. :)

June 3rd, 2008 at 10:58 pm

Tom Camfield says:

This is a really long comment thread so my little comment might get lost, but maybe someone will explore and find it, so… a worry I have with the Achievement system on the 360 and now on Steam is that instead of leaving fun things for people to find, developers might feel the need to put a massive Achievement sign pointing towards them, like the Gnome achievement in HL2:E2. I wonder if it would have been more fun without the sign, and just left as something amusing to do, but perhaps it’s not the problem I perceive.

June 3rd, 2008 at 11:21 pm

spd from Russia says:

good article! I also love exploration in games

June 3rd, 2008 at 11:39 pm

dhelor says:

How odd, I was just recently dsicussing this very topic recently on GamersWithJobs.com.

June 3rd, 2008 at 11:56 pm

ScubaV says:

I wonder if anyone’s actually reading down here at the bottom of this mammoth comments section. Anyway, I think Gothic 1 and 2 are the pinnacles of games with exploration. The worlds are hand-crafted rather than computer-generated. They’re nearly the perfect size: not so small that you feel cramped, but not so big that the world feels redundant and without purpose. You’re free to explore anywhere that you can survive and will be rewarded for it, but the world isn’t a sandbox. It gives much needed structure that allows it to succeed as a game and an RPG.

June 4th, 2008 at 1:27 am

Belo says:

I wanted to like Stalker, but in the end the dodgey combat design just killed any interest I had in it.

I love me some Oblivion, and return it to every few months for a romp with whatever kind’ve character I feel like.

June 4th, 2008 at 3:55 am

Mr. President says:

The first time I popped my exploration boner was when I saw someone playing Jungle Strike for Sega Genesis in an electronics store. I thought, “Wow, they’ve recreated an entire city! And you can fly your chopper wherever you want!” And even though the city turned out pretty much empty, the ability to just abandon your mission and fly around Washington sightseeing felt amazing at the time.

Would anyone pay for a game that was created in the name of aimless wandering tourism? Could anything in a game world be interesting enough just to go and look at?

Well, apparenty, why else Nintendo would bother releasing this game:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endless_Ocean

June 4th, 2008 at 7:49 am

Lu-Tze says:

Speaking of Age of Conan, last night I actually realised how disappointingly linear the maps feel.

Most of the places i’ve been so far, you cannot stray from the “path”. If you want to get somewhere, you work out which route to take along them because if you try going cross country you get about 50 foot before the terrain becomes too steep to climb. There’s no obvious indication of this on the map, and so it drastically inhibits my willingness to explore because I might walk for 5 minutes in a direction to find myself doubling back all the way because I can’t get any further. That goes triple for water, where the only place you can exit the river you just jumped into is 3 miles in the wrong direction.

This feeds powerfully into their PvP culture, as it is becoming typical to find that oft used bridges have their very own lvl 80 Troll, just waiting to gank you for daring to try and cross.

June 4th, 2008 at 10:22 am

Charlie says:

Personally i feel AI has a lot to do with it. In GTA4 it feels like npcs have just randomly spawned and are doing a random animation specific to that area. Whereas the npcs you encounter in Stalker feel more real because you know they are actually up to something. Plus GTA4 just felt like running around in a giant static mesh

June 4th, 2008 at 11:41 am

Ian says:

@ matte k: Where in this month’s PCG UK is the feature on Oblivion mods? I’m likely being a total dolt, and it’s probably because I’ve managed to not notice some pages are stuck together, but I really can’t find it. :(

June 4th, 2008 at 1:38 pm

Ian says:

It’s a different variant of doofusosity than I’d expected. I have the previous issue of PC Gamer and have obviously picked it up on one of the last few days before it was taken off the shelves.

So the reason I can’t find it is because I don’t have that issue. :D

June 4th, 2008 at 2:22 pm

Acosta says:

Loving the new tag. RPS masterminds must be preparing their plan to conquer internet using all this feedback, something like calling the page: Fallout of Oblivion’s Pirates. Plenty of internet money granted!

June 4th, 2008 at 3:07 pm

Muzman says:

For a moment there I thought brown was the new black and review scores was the new piracy. But no, just a big thread.

Not nearly enough Freelancer love. It’s a genuinely great exploration game, somewhat in disguise I grant you, but it’s there. Maybe if I’d played more space games over the years I wouldn’t have been so, ultimately, impressed. But I enjoyed wandering a lot, and a lot of love went into that wandering too. If I could contrast Stalker; I’m not nuts about it’s story but it manages to be unintrusive for some reason. It doesn’t hurt the overall vibe. Freelancer’s story and plot elements genuinely get in the way. They try and create the usual sort of narrative drive and urgency and it just shouldn’t be there. In fact I found obeying the apparent conventions before made the game much more difficult; There’s usually a point in each ‘act’ where you are set loose to do your own thing, then after a certain amount of money you get a message to come back to the story by someone. If you actually did that every time the game would be short and rediculously hard. You wouldn’t have enough money and you’d be in dust ups all the time, which isn’t that much fun. And, worst of all you’d skim through some very large and interesting places. Sure space is flat, the simulation is best described as Lite, they’re pulling whacky forced perspective (travel around a solar system and, if the draw distance is long enough, see that the gas giants are several times larger than the stars. Which doesn’t really happen that often really) and the economics is some distance below Lemonade Stand in complexity.
But after I finished and got to free play I systematically made myself neutral with just about every faction (which is fun in itself) and could roam where I pleased. And all the little things you find off the beated track; abandonned jump gates, trade lanes under construction, join a formation with a long haul trucking convoy (after you ask them where they’re going and they say) and when you think you are finally at the end of it all in some otherwise empty system whose peculiar make-up makes it seem like you are surrounded by blue skies, there’s a Freeport or some lonely outpost where the bar tender doesn’t know your name. The place’s little history goes in your collection and off you go again. “Hmm maybe this time I’ll smuggle illegal drugs into the central planets”

It’s really cool. I wish they’d turned around on it quickly and brought out a big open sequel. I’m sure nobody wanted to after its protracted development, but there’s a really fun game hiding there and I believe it’s almost MMO-ishly played online to this day.

June 4th, 2008 at 4:19 pm

Okami says:

This just in: Yahtzee reviews Oblivion this week on Zero Punctuation.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/75-Oblivion

June 4th, 2008 at 5:18 pm

Okami says:

Cargo Cult: That’s because every wednesday starting at 18h (CET) I open up The Escapist in my browser and hit F5 every few seconds.

I admit it, I’m a Zero Punctuation fanboy.

June 4th, 2008 at 5:32 pm

mist says:

My thoughts on oblivion exploration:

Having a mod that kills the compass is a MUST. The feeling you get when you turn around a corner and are suddenly standing face to face with a daedric shrine is way better than just having the shrine blinking on your compass 6 hours before you actually reach the place.

On a related note: the daedric shrines really rocked. I loved the “collecting by exploration” things that oblivion had: the nirnroot, the daedric shrines, the books with statbonuses (I actually read all of those that I found), the books that were part of a series (read most of them..), the 10 alyied (or whatever) ruins that contained rare artefacts that you could collect for a quest, getting the blessings from all the gods from the wayshrines, etc.

Just exploring the terrain was also nice (especially since that daedric shrine that you wanted to find might be hiding behind that mountain..), but I agree with others that the 600000 identical dungeons/caves/castles/ruins that basically contained a few levelled monsters and some random loot and nothing more were a bit.. meh. Having less of those locations, but in the same area size (so spread further apart) would’ve improved the game alot.

Oh, and I spend a few hundred hours on the game and still haven’t found all the daedric ruins. So I can imagine that someone who only spent 20 hours on the game may have found zero, or maybe 1 or 2, and thus that element of the game is completely lost on them.

June 4th, 2008 at 8:03 pm

Kong says:

For me Exploration is the most important thing in computer games. Discovering hidden valleys, standing on a high cliff at sunset in a game with high end graphics in open worlds is as satisfying exploration wise as entering a new level in linear games.
Morrowind I liked better than Oblivion. Stalker worked better for me than Half Life 2. I did finish Morrowind and Stalker, Oblivion and HL 2 I did not.
Oblivion did not entertain me for all the reasons mentioned by others above but the most annoying factor was the teleporting guards that appeared in empty cellars of empty houses out of thin air when I stole an apple.
In Stalker every new level/area offered something different while in HL2 I grew tired of being jumped at by headcrabs in corridors I have seen in every other FPS for more than ten years now.
Exploration in PC games means that I can see something new, new atmosphere, new enemies, new situations when I climb a mountain or enter a new level.
Fallout had great exploration mechanics, even though it was a fast travel map with chance encounters. Finding a new, lovely designed unique place in the wasteland was exciting.
Exploring the island of Operation Flashpoint after winning the war and discovering how huge it actually was, now that was exciting too…travelling by car, then helicopter and it just would not end nor load. In Oblivion every tiny shed is an instance for god’s sake.
For an old gamer like myself there is not much exploring left in the world of pc games. Been there, seen it all. Well almost all, Stalker meets Gothic meets Operation Flashpoint meets Vampire Bloodlines will come true – for me to be explored within the next 20 years, I am sure. And I will make myself King of Aquilonia. Crom!
Hope dies last.

June 5th, 2008 at 1:31 am

garren says:

Oblivion, while criticized for its lackluster RPG-elements among other things, at least was said to be strong in one thing: Exploration and immersiveness

Yahtzee slaps it by saying it’s one of the least immersive RPGs he ever played. Ouch :D

June 6th, 2008 at 2:11 am

RichPowers says:

@Bacon
Agreed. As Yahtzee says in his review, Oblivion’s world may be huge, but much of it is uninteresting. I love the little details in HL2, like the newspaper clippings showing the 7-Hour War (such details provide narrative background so the game can avoid forced recaps and history lectures from NPCs…)

The detail is what counts. But wide open worlds provide excellent photo op moments and that “Lewis and Clark” sense of charting vast, unexplored territory.

WoW has all sorts of little details that make the gameworld fun to explore. Ever notice how most MMORPGs feature dull expanses of rendered forests with little to explore in between?

June 6th, 2008 at 4:45 am

Deutoronomy says:

Star f-ing Control 2.

June 6th, 2008 at 7:15 pm

Jess says:

This is weird to admit, but I was really affected by the grand, beautiful waste of space in Just Cause. The ultra-mediocre action wasn’t worthy of the environment it took place in; it was truly a game where wandering became the only reason I’d play it. After finishing the storyline, I spent a lot of time flying around and noting small points of interest, impressed by the periodic architectural curiosities thrown around (most of which you’d never see unless wandering) and kind of hoping for some magical AI surprise to appear. You have lots of ‘random’ interactions between gangsters and police on the road offering tantalizing echoes of far-off gunfire, but it’s never worth checking out, no matter how unscripted. I’ve rarely seen as potential-filled a game world in an action game, honestly. I was really shocked at how mod-proof they made it; some added content would definitely have brought me back for more play. At one point I realized that that island world would take a REALLY long time navigate around if you never had access to vehicles and had fun stuff to keep you trekking from one spot to the next– the game affords some really beautiful clifftop vistas just asking for some wandering warrior to stop and gaze at before making it to the next town. Yet another “let’s hope the sequel offers more” case… In the meantime, where’s the modding genius who can hack that thing?

June 10th, 2008 at 11:43 am

Lucky Main Street says:

There’s a game called Kyntt that focus on exploration and collection. There’s a few platformer type enemies and jumps, but very very few. I’ve heard it described as an ambient game, which exploration generally would be, and it’s really great. Secret passages are A1. Don’t get the sequel though.

June 17th, 2008 at 9:41 pm

Ian says:

I love Just Cause.

Driving a car off a bridge, jumping out, and then harpooning another car below so you can paraglide behind it will never get old.

June 18th, 2008 at 10:57 am

myname says:

“Would anyone pay for a game that was created in the name of aimless wandering tourism?”

Oh yes they would – and pay for it too! People already travel further and seeking weirder adventures IRL. Online ones would be an acceptable and cheaper alternative. Online socialising also increases.
Definately a viable business opportunity

September 14th, 2008 at 9:32 pm